Mobile Home Owners Battle Rent Initiative

Nearly 40 mobile home owners, most of them elderly, gathered Sunday to plan strategy to fight what they see as a threat to their way of life--a proposed statewide initiative to abolish rent control in mobile home parks.

If the initiative passes, “I would have to pay more,” said 92-year-old Anthony Stella, who has lived at the Oakridge Mobile Home Community in the Sylmar foothills for 14 years. “What am I going to do? Where am I going to go at my age? Move around like a Gypsy? I can’t do that.”

The initiative would prevent any new rent-control ordinances from taking effect and allow rents to rise with the consumer price index in currently rent-controlled areas. It would also provide subsidies for low-income renters, to be administered directly by park owners, for up to 10% of the residents at each park.

While the sponsors argue that eliminating rent control will free up between $4 million and $5 million in tax dollars, mobile home residents--many of whom get by on fixed incomes--fear that it would destroy a lifestyle they have come to love.

“At a mobile home park you’ve got security,” said 77-year-old Otto Zielke, who, with his wife, Harriet, bought a mobile home and settled in a Canoga Park mobile home park about 11 years ago. “Neighbors take care of their neighbors. That’s the difference between a mobile home park and an apartment.”

A spokesman for the initiative said the mobile home owners are overreacting. Park owners, said Dennis Wolcott, “are not out to kick little old ladies out of mobile home parks.”

Only 40% of California’s mobile home sites are rent-controlled, he added.

But Dave Hennessy, president of the state’s mobile home owners association, warned the group assembled Sunday in the clubhouse of the Oakridge park that this would be a life-and-death battle.

He called the initiative, scheduled for the March ballot, “a method of trying to put us in Stalag 17.”

“Make sure you communicate with the outside world and tell them this damn fool thing is coming down on us, and we need their support,” Hennessy said.